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Cambridge Review of International Affairs

ISSN: 0955-7571 (Print) 1474-449X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccam20

Political discourses on Europe and European integration in national election manifestos and party programmes

Osman Sabri Kiratli

To cite this article: Osman Sabri Kiratli (2015): Political discourses on Europe and European integration in national election manifestos and party programmes, Cambridge Review of

International Affairs, DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2015.1058670

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2015.1058670

Published online: 15 Jul 2015.

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Date: 27 February 2016, At: 11:23

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Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2015.1058670

Political discourses on Europe and European integration in national election manifestos and party programmes

Osman Sabri Kiratli

Bogazici University

Abstract Through a textual analysis of national election manifestos, this paper critically discusses political parties’ discourses towards Europe and European integration in three European Union (EU) member states: Germany, which has always promoted further integration; the United Kingdom, which has consistently been a keen supporter of intergovernmentalism; and finally the Netherlands, one of the original six and a willing, yet cautious, supporter of supranational cooperation. By analysing how political parties frame European integration in their discourses, we aim to investigate the variance in national political cultures with respect to identity and self-identification with Europe as a determining factor of support for the process. This paper concludes that although European integration is structured around a framework of interests in all the six party discourses under analysis, the construction of national identities and hence the articulation of national interest in EU membership as well as the visions for the political structure of the union varies significantly.

Introduction

Since the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam irreversibly paved the way for a tighter Europe, the saliency of European integration has risen considerably in political party debates. In this process, voters’ opinions have become less susceptible to manipulation by the elites, and party discourses have started to be shaped more by voter preferences (Marks and Steenbergen 2004). Indeed, several studies have pointed out that taking a position on European integration affects the votes that political parties receive in national elections (for example, Evans 1999; Gabel 2000; Tillman 2004; Evans and Butt 2007). In turn, how parties position themselves towards Europe has proven a fruitful opening for academic research. To explain party positioning on Europe, scholars pursuing different theoretical agendas have focused on ideological cleavages (for example, Marks and Wilson 2000; Hooghe et al 2002), strategic calculations in party behaviour (Hix and Lord 1997; Scott 2001), the structural role the party plays within the political competition as a mainstream or a niche/protest party (Mattila and Raunio 2009; Taggart 1998; Hix 1999; Mair 2000) and finally the material interests of the state in which the party resides in (Moravcsik 1998).

As a result of these numerous studies, today we know quite a lot about the causal dynamics of party positioning with respect to European integration. But we know less about how political parties justify their positions, how they articulate Europe and European integration and how they conceive their country’s image

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2 Osman Sabri Kiratli

within the broader European polity. We know equally little about the salient representations and popular themes adopted in political parties’ framing of European integration. Studying party discourses, however, is a significant task, as it can reveal different formulations of national identities and political culture, which in turn lead to varied attitudes to European integration. Such an enquiry can also help us understand why support for integration has been higher in some countries than in others and shed more light on the future prospects of the integration process.

Even though there have been partial examinations of how the different levels of national and European identities interact within the political discourses of party elites in member states (for example, Marcussen et al 1999; Statham 2008), there is a lack of cross-national comparative and longitudinal research on the role of political parties in representing national and European identities and seeking to make collective (national and European) identities salient in public debates. Systematic textual studies of party discourses for this purpose are rare and limited to media datasets (for example, Helbling et al 2010) rather than official party documents. The objective of this paper is to investigate dominant representations and frames in party discourses to uncover variances in collective identities which lead to differing attitudes towards European integration. The enquiry will be based on a discourse analysis of political party manifestos and programmes in three prominent European Union (EU) members: Germany, the United Kingdom (UK) and the Netherlands. For each country two parties and for each party the documents published for national elections from the end of World War II until 2012 are selected for investigation.

On a theoretical level, I presuppose that, along with ideological cleavages, strategic calculations and national interests, domestic orientations towards Europe are also shaped by national identities and cultures. As Juan Diez Medrano notes, nation-states are key socialization agencies in individuals’ lives (2003, 6). The cultural repertoire that is gradually formed through historical and social forces within the bounded space individuals reside in gives rise to certain worldviews. These dominant discourses, which can greatly vary across nations, are processed by the social actors and, once internalized, affect how actors evaluate social and political issues, including those related to European integration.

Political parties are critical intermediaries in this process. The broader structure of national culture and identities mould political parties’ discourses on European integration, and political parties, if they are elected to government, set national interests and decide state policies towards Europe. Political parties also serve as active agents that link political culture and identity to individuals. Discourses generated at the party level are conveyed to individuals, who may be passive recipients as electorates through cueing mechanisms (Hooghe and Marks 2005; Steenbergen et al 2007; Ray 2003) or active participants as party members through robust political socialization (Dalton and Weldon 2007; Karp and Banducci 2007).

The three countries studied in this paper differ in their attitudes towards European integration and thus are expected to differ in terms of political discourse adopted at the party level. Germany has always acted as the engine of further integration and been a keen supporter of supranationalism. In the words of Katzenstein, Germany is a ‘tamed power‘ in Europe (Katzenstein 1997). The

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Political discourses on Europe and European integration 3

Netherlands, another member of the original six, has largely been a willing participant in developing a tighter Europe, but with serious reservations about the effects on transatlantic cooperation and the political consequences. While Germany is characterized as an ‘exaggerated multilateralist‘ (Anderson 1999), the Netherlands could be called an ‘instrumental supranationalist‘ at best (Van Keulen 2006, 96). Finally, the UK, in contrast to the former two, has consistently held back from further integration and been an ardent critic of supranationalism. Winston Churchill once said that the UK is ‘with Europe, but not of it‘ and little has changed since then. Choosing three member states with vastly different preferences for the institutional structure of European integration will allow us to uncover the mediated effect of national culture on differing projections of European integration.

The remainder of the paper consists of seven sections. The first section will discuss the theoretical underpinnings of identity construction within the context of European integration and the role of political parties in this process. The second section will discuss the research methods employed in this inquiry. The following three sections will present the data and highlights of party discourses in the three countries about the notion of European integration, national and European identities and the preferred political structure of further integration. The sixth chapter will discuss the findings and the last chapter will conclude the paper.

Identity construction and political parties

Identity can be defined as ‘images of individuality and distinctiveness (selfhood) held and projected by an actor and formed and modified over time through relations with significant others‘ (Katzenstein 1996, 6). Sociologists working on identities propose that social actors gain agency in relations with others by putting the identity they build up for themselves into practice (Berger 1966; Rutherford 1998; McSweeney 1999). In that sense, identities are a function of both an actor’s self-understanding and his or her interactions with others. Identities not only address features that are shared among groups of individuals, but also define a community and an ‘other’ that does not share common ideational characteristics. Consequently, social identities have internal and external dimensions. The internal dimension encompasses the set of norms, values and discourses that creates and holds the social group together (Smith 1991). The external dimension, on the other hand, involves the self-placement of a community relative to similar entities and other actors (Banchoff 1997, 12). Any threats to the internal and external categorizations that constitute the pillars of an actor’s identity are considered a source of distress for actors and thus are to be avoided. Social actors therefore, including states, Jennifer Mitzen claims, seek not only to preserve their physical security and address threats to their territorial and structural unity, but also to maintain their ‘ontological security’ and secure their identity as the source of stable preferences and interests (Mitzen 2006).

Within the context of European integration, member states’ self-identification with Europe, how domestic groups construct national identity and how they situate themselves within the framework of European integration have an important effect on internal and external community-building processes and thus state decisions to transfer some national sovereignty to the supranational level.

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4 Osman Sabri Kiratli

A positive identification with Europe and the EU will advance the notion of ‘weness‘ and bolster the belief in belonging to the same whole.1 This will lead to the perception that it is not necessarily a zero-sum game between Brussels and the national capital and that instead the two sides can equally benefit from the transfer of competencies to the supranational level. A negative identification with Europe, on the other hand, will provoke a threat to the actor’s ontological security. A disparity in corporate identities between the EU and the member state will lead the masses to restrict the inclusive concept of ‘we-ness‘ to those sharing the same national affinity. The perception will be that some of the national sovereign rights are ‘surrendered to the “others”, which do not share the same identity with “us”‘ (Koenig-Archibugi 2004, 146). For actors with weak European identification, the EU, as a polity in the making, will be perceived as a threat both to the decisionmaking autonomy of national institutions and to the core values of national identity and sovereignty (Marks and Hooghe 2003; Risse 2002).

One particular arena that conveys and shapes discussions on the construction of political identity is political parties. Political parties in parliamentary democracies have an important leverage in foreign policy decisions. They can influence leaders’ abilities to construct domestic coalitions for the implementations of policies or to reject or change foreign policy proposals in parliament (Katzenstein 1996, 8). If elected, they form governments that will be expected to execute policies in line with electoral preferences and sensitivities, as any disparity between the two may result in a letdown in the next elections. At the same time, political parties present issues of national and international politics to a wider audience and thus influence the formation of public opinion (Zaller 1992; Ray 2003). In situations where the public is disinterested or ill informed, or the issue is of a complex nature, as European integration tends to be, the parties can also cue the electorate and supplement them with heuristic devices through which they can make sense of the issue and form an opinion (Steenbergen et al 2007; Hooghe and Marks 2008).

From these premises, we can infer that political parties are influential mediums in the construction and reproduction of political discourse towards European integration from the mould of a broader social culture and identity embedded in a given polity. Political parties engage in this construction process through framing narratives belonging to Europe and the national polity as specific models that are consistent with their ideational orientation as well as the cultural and political orientation of the society, and call on the electorate to take a position. By inducing certain frames, ‘patterns of presentation, of selection, emphasis and exclusion‘ (Gitlin 1980, 7) which ‘define problems‘ (Entman 1993, 52), political parties set the parameters within which the electorate evaluate the question of European integration (Bleich 2003; Medrano 2003). Depending on the identity they represent, political parties can choose to frame European integration either in a discourse that will promote more supranational integration, by which a portion of national sovereignty would be transferred to Brussels, or more

1 According to Karl Deutsch, we-feeling is an essential part of a sense of community which he defines as ‘a matter of mutual sympathy and loyalties; trust and mutual consideration; of partial identification in terms of self-images and interests; of mutually successful predictions of behaviour, and of co-operative action in accordance with it’ (Deutsch et al 1957, 36).